1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic ticket system, a collecting terminal, a service providing terminal, a user terminal, an electronic ticket collecting method and a recording medium, all being for use in a system which utilizes electronic tickets and all being capable of preventing illegal actions such as copying an electronic ticket and information concerning its use, etc.
2. Description of the Related Art
Of late, an electronic ticket system which carries out transactions through the use of electronic tickets has been proposed.
In the above system, an issuing agency issues an electronic ticket to a user, and the user sends the electronic ticket to a service providing agency when he/she uses the electronic ticket, in order to request services, etc. from the service providing agency. The used electronic ticket, which the service providing agency has received from the user, is collected by a collecting agency or the like, and is returned to the issuing agency. Simultaneously, the charge for the electronic ticket as used and returned to the issuing agency is paid to the service providing agency.
In order to find out any illegal actions beforehand, it has been planned to send to the issuing agency the to-be-used electronic ticket which the service providing agency has received from the user, and to provide the user with services after the electronic ticket is authenticated. In this case, however, online reference transactions have to be made each time the user uses such an electronic ticket, and the processing speed is low accordingly.
Furthermore, there is the possibility that any unjust service providing agency, for example, may copy the used electronic ticket received from the user and send its copies to the collecting agency in order to unjustly charge a large amount of money.
There is a plan to store data in a highly tamperproof storage device as a countermeasure against the illegal action of copying important data without permission. In this case, as regards the electronic ticket which the user has, the illegal copying action can be prevented by storing data in an IC card or the like. However, since the service providing agency receives electronic tickets from individual users and the collecting agency collects used electronic tickets from the service providing agency, a huge number of electronic tickets are concentrated at the service providing agency and the collecting agency. Under this condition, an IC card or the like is not sufficient to store huge data, and a highly tamperproof specific storage device having a large capacity is necessary.
Not only electronic tickets having a monetary value, but also other various tickets involve such problems.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above circumstances, and it is an object of the present invention to provide a quick-response electronic ticket system, a collecting terminal, a service providing terminal, a user terminal, an electronic ticket collecting method and a recording medium, all being capable of preventing the illegal action of copying an electronic ticket and information concerning its use, without requiring any specific hardware.